May 2, 2013

Hot Docs '13: Shooting Bigfoot

***/****directed
by Morgan Matthews

by
Angelo Muredda There's a Weakerthans song
called "Bigfoot!" about a Manitoba ferry operator who was harassed by
local media for disclosing his alleged encounter with the furry legend.
It's an oddly affecting little thing, especially around the chorus,
where the man insists--likely just to himself--that he won't go through
it all again "when the visions that I've seen will believe me." If
nothing else, Morgan Matthews's genre-crossing Shooting
Bigfoot confirms that the loneliness and
hermeticism of the poor Manitoban's life after Bigfoot--defined by a
vision he can't possibly share, for obvious reasons--is pretty standard
stuff in the cult of sightings. Mixing Werner Herzog's eccentric
profiles with both Christopher Guest's institutional satire and an
unexpected but not unwelcome helping of The Blair Witch
Project, the film starts as an arm's-length survey of
Bigfoot culture before fully immersing itself in its manic compilation
of signs and wonders.

Matthews is at his best when he cuts loose from his Discovery
Channel instincts, jettisoning the position paper-speak, banal
voiceover assertions ("I still wasn't convinced"), and archival news
clips of frauds past to let his troupe of weirdos do most of the
editorializing in their own wickedly funny words. That crew ranges from
a pseudo-skeptical alpha male with a Snapple fixation to a couple of
men with serious cognitive disabilities, for whom seeing uncanny beasts
in the forest is an impairment more than a boon. Shooting Bigfoot also includes a proven huckster named Rick, a paranoid and deeply
unpleasant "master tracker" who ushers us into a very different sort of
movie in the final third. The found-footage horror that ensues as
Matthews becomes the spookily-armed Rick's sidekick and surrogate pair
of eyes is as much an epistemological as a structural cheat, yet the
rudimentary shock of the reveal is well-executed enough that you
probably won't care.